Monday, March 7, 2011

Vision Troubleshooting #3

Performance of the machine vision inspection system has declined every month and finally Production has had enough of the false rejects. Your mission is to find out why it was getting worse and put it back to its as-new performance.

Start by comparing the images it acquires now with the baseline images that were saved at the machine run-off or acceptance. You might need to run them through an emulation program to actually find differences in grayscale levels or changes in the background, but in most situations that’s where your problems are.

But if you don’t have baseline data? Well shame on you. What I suggest then is that you get the system back to its as-new condition. Clean everything – lights, lenses, part fixtures – then run a trial to see if you’ve improved things. Hopefully it’s running better, but if not, it’s Vision Troubleshooting #4 for you.